Spreadsheets are a pervasive technology throughout personal and industrial use. Often times, the user is not the author, contributing to a lack of understanding of the purpose and functionality of a spreadsheet. Furthermore, the lack of understanding is a major reason for mistakes in the use and maintenance of spreadsheets....
A five year study of file-system metadata shows that the number of files increases by 200% and only a select few file-types contribute for over 35% of the files that exist on a file-system. It is difficult to point out a permanent selection of files that a user really cares...
Assessing and understanding intelligent agents can be a difficult task for users who may lack an artificial intelligence (AI) background. A relatively new area, called “explainable AI,” is emerging to help address this problem, but little is known about how to present and structure information that an explanation system might...
Software developers frequently need to perform code maintenance tasks, but doing so requires time-consuming navigation through code. A variety of tools are aimed at easing this navigation by using models to predict places in the code that a developer might want to visit, and then providing shortcuts so that the...
This M.S thesis presents an interactive software tool that I have developed in the course of the past two years. This interactive tool is called AISO. AISO is aimed at interactive image segmentation and annotation tool designed to allow users to segment an image – such as those produced with...
While there are powerful keyword search systems that index all kinds of resources including emails and web pages, people have trouble recalling semantic facts such as the name, location, edit dates and keywords that uniquely identifies resources in their personal repositories. Reusing information exasperates this problem. A rarely used approach...
Pattern grading is a method of creating multiple sizes of a garment style. Grading to extreme sizes is not recommended since the design and drape of the garment can be distorted. Researchers suggest that customized fit is a solution for creating sizes in a garment style. However, manufacturers continue to...
The relationship between the public and new technologies has historically been a tumultuous one, with public perceptions ranging from excited rapid adoption to standoffish pessimism. In 2011, IBM tried to use competition as a means of showcasing a new technology to the public. This thesis is a work of rhetorical...
Empirical studies have shown that programmers spend up to one-third of their time navigating through code during debugging. Although researchers have conducted empirical studies to understand programmers’ navigation difficulties and developed tools to address those difficulties, the resulting findings tend to be loosely connected to each other. To address this...
In this thesis I present the choice calculus, a formal language for representing variation in software and other structured artifacts. The choice calculus is intended to support variation research in a way similar to the lambda calculus in programming language research. Specifically, it provides a simple formal basis for presenting,...